What to do when your boss never takes responsibility?
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Posts: 6,651
Do any of you have bosses like this - or have you in the past? What do you do about it (if you can't quit your job)?
In the nearly 8 years I've worked for him, I've never heard my boss take responsibility for anything. He's a total micro-manager, so he doesn't really let anyone just do their job as they see fit. But he's also like an ADHD Dr. Jekyll & Mr. Hyde, so he wants things done however he feels like they should be done at any given time, but then changes his mind about what he wants and blames everyone else for not doing what he wanted.
I'll give you three examples:
1. Part of my job is to make the schedules for about 75 physicians to cover 3 inpatient services (which require 24/7 coverage) and 5 clinics. My boss has agreed to follow certain guidelines with the schedules and he tells me it's my job to make sure they're followed and he holds me responsible when they're not. But then he constantly steps in and tells me exactly who to schedule when - usually for his own benefit or because he thinks whatever random idea has popped into his mind at any given moment is a good one. What he tells me frequently conflicts with the guidelines he has established, but he doesn't want to hear it.
For instance, he said I have to make sure our fellows have at least 4 days off per month. Nine months ago when we did the inpatient schedules for the year, he told me to give the fellows two inpatient weeks each in February, despite my cautioning him that I thought this was too much. Now when it's come time to do the daily clinic schedules and make sure everyone gets their 4 days off, it's not mathematically possible. (I know it would be ideal to figure these things out before scheduling the inpatient weeks, but we can't do the clinic schedules as far in advance as we have to do the inpatient schedules.) One of the fellows is now scheduled to work 26 out of 28 days in February, with 14 of those days being 24-hr shifts. That's too much whether we have guidelines or not, but we absolutely cannot pull her off any inpatient weeks. So today when I told him we'll have to cancel two days of clinic in order for her to get 4 days off, he blamed me for screwing up, saying "Well you're the one who did the inpatient schedule!" (And if I so much as politely point out that he's the one who made me schedule it that way, he'll say, "Well you don't have to get defensive!" or he'll just flat out deny it.)
2. I have to take minutes for a monthly committee meeting we have. Ideally, we would get the minutes out within a week of the meeting and everyone would complete the action items assigned to them by the next meeting. But in reality, this frequently doesn't happen because when something else pops into my boss's consciousness he wants me to stop everything and do the new thing right away - and this happens several times a day. (I swear, I can't work like this much longer.) So they often don't get done until the week of the next meeting, when it's the meeting that's foremost on his mind and he tells me to stop everything and do the minutes. This has never been a problem for the committee. He complains that people don't have time to complete their action items, but I think if they agreed to do something they should be responsible for getting it done whether I send out a reminder in the minutes or not. Also, he has to take the minutes when I'm out and he never does them until the night before the next meeting, so obviously it's not that big a deal. So our next meeting was scheduled for tomorrow and he specifically asked me to send out a reminder yesterday even though he knew the minutes wouldn't be done until today (because he had told me to drop everything and do the schedules). But today he realized he double-booked himself and decided to cancel tomorrow's meeting because of it. But when he told me to send out a notice that it's canceled, he said he's having to cancel it not because he fucked up his schedule, but because I didn't do the minutes in time - despite the fact that late minutes have never been a reason to cancel a meeting and even yesterday he thought we should have the meeting anyway.
3. This one happened when I was about a year into this job. We have a resident training grant and part of the documentation process is that the residents must complete surveys before and after their training so the funder can assess whether it's having the desired impact. All this was set up before I was hired, but when I was hired I was told about the grant and that I'm responsible for collecting these surveys. I run the training & manage the grant, so by this time I was confident that I had a pretty good handle on everything. So one day my boss tells me to complete an annual progress report for the Human Research Review Committee. This is the committee that makes sure we comply with all the regulations when we do research on people. Apparently, unbeknownst to me and before I was even hired, he decided he might want to publish something about our training program some day, using information from the surveys. This makes the residents study subjects. So I'm completing this progress report for the "study" and it says we need to submit our last signed consent. What consent? I didn't know anything about any consent. No one even told me this was a study. I had never seen a consent and certainly hadn't been collecting them before getting the residents to complete the surveys required for the grant. Well that put us - him, really, since it's his study - into some really deep shit! They view it the same as if we were injecting patients with HIV or something without getting their consent. Thankfully, they decided to give us a slap on the wrist and just require us to go to a training about the importance of regulating research on human subjects (really interesting class, actually). But he had a fit and wrote an official letter (which he actually made me type up and deliver) saying it was all my fault that I failed to comply with study requirements. His idea of taking responsibility in the matter was to say that he shouldn't have trusted me to work without closer supervision.
Anyway, sorry for the dissertation. (Brevity has never been my strong suit. :oops: ) Maybe I just needed to get that off my chest. But these are just a few examples of what happens on a regular basis and it's so frustrating. It's like working with a 5-year-old who always points the finger at someone else when he's in trouble, except since he's smarter than a 5-year-old he's able to be more manipulative.
I just don't know what to do about it. I feel like I can't win. The administration knows how he is; everyone has a hard time working with him for many more reasons than just this one. They made him go to personality training for awhile when we started losing medical assistants and faculty started threatening to quit. I'm the third staff person in my position and the previous two didn't last for more than 6 months. But he's a brilliant, internationally renowned physician who does great things for our patients and brings in more clinical revenue than any other faculty member. And he's actually a good guy except for his personality problems. I mean, he's not evil or mean-spirited or anything - just self-serving.
Has anyone else here ever been in a similar situation? How did you deal with it? :?
In the nearly 8 years I've worked for him, I've never heard my boss take responsibility for anything. He's a total micro-manager, so he doesn't really let anyone just do their job as they see fit. But he's also like an ADHD Dr. Jekyll & Mr. Hyde, so he wants things done however he feels like they should be done at any given time, but then changes his mind about what he wants and blames everyone else for not doing what he wanted.
I'll give you three examples:
1. Part of my job is to make the schedules for about 75 physicians to cover 3 inpatient services (which require 24/7 coverage) and 5 clinics. My boss has agreed to follow certain guidelines with the schedules and he tells me it's my job to make sure they're followed and he holds me responsible when they're not. But then he constantly steps in and tells me exactly who to schedule when - usually for his own benefit or because he thinks whatever random idea has popped into his mind at any given moment is a good one. What he tells me frequently conflicts with the guidelines he has established, but he doesn't want to hear it.
For instance, he said I have to make sure our fellows have at least 4 days off per month. Nine months ago when we did the inpatient schedules for the year, he told me to give the fellows two inpatient weeks each in February, despite my cautioning him that I thought this was too much. Now when it's come time to do the daily clinic schedules and make sure everyone gets their 4 days off, it's not mathematically possible. (I know it would be ideal to figure these things out before scheduling the inpatient weeks, but we can't do the clinic schedules as far in advance as we have to do the inpatient schedules.) One of the fellows is now scheduled to work 26 out of 28 days in February, with 14 of those days being 24-hr shifts. That's too much whether we have guidelines or not, but we absolutely cannot pull her off any inpatient weeks. So today when I told him we'll have to cancel two days of clinic in order for her to get 4 days off, he blamed me for screwing up, saying "Well you're the one who did the inpatient schedule!" (And if I so much as politely point out that he's the one who made me schedule it that way, he'll say, "Well you don't have to get defensive!" or he'll just flat out deny it.)
2. I have to take minutes for a monthly committee meeting we have. Ideally, we would get the minutes out within a week of the meeting and everyone would complete the action items assigned to them by the next meeting. But in reality, this frequently doesn't happen because when something else pops into my boss's consciousness he wants me to stop everything and do the new thing right away - and this happens several times a day. (I swear, I can't work like this much longer.) So they often don't get done until the week of the next meeting, when it's the meeting that's foremost on his mind and he tells me to stop everything and do the minutes. This has never been a problem for the committee. He complains that people don't have time to complete their action items, but I think if they agreed to do something they should be responsible for getting it done whether I send out a reminder in the minutes or not. Also, he has to take the minutes when I'm out and he never does them until the night before the next meeting, so obviously it's not that big a deal. So our next meeting was scheduled for tomorrow and he specifically asked me to send out a reminder yesterday even though he knew the minutes wouldn't be done until today (because he had told me to drop everything and do the schedules). But today he realized he double-booked himself and decided to cancel tomorrow's meeting because of it. But when he told me to send out a notice that it's canceled, he said he's having to cancel it not because he fucked up his schedule, but because I didn't do the minutes in time - despite the fact that late minutes have never been a reason to cancel a meeting and even yesterday he thought we should have the meeting anyway.
3. This one happened when I was about a year into this job. We have a resident training grant and part of the documentation process is that the residents must complete surveys before and after their training so the funder can assess whether it's having the desired impact. All this was set up before I was hired, but when I was hired I was told about the grant and that I'm responsible for collecting these surveys. I run the training & manage the grant, so by this time I was confident that I had a pretty good handle on everything. So one day my boss tells me to complete an annual progress report for the Human Research Review Committee. This is the committee that makes sure we comply with all the regulations when we do research on people. Apparently, unbeknownst to me and before I was even hired, he decided he might want to publish something about our training program some day, using information from the surveys. This makes the residents study subjects. So I'm completing this progress report for the "study" and it says we need to submit our last signed consent. What consent? I didn't know anything about any consent. No one even told me this was a study. I had never seen a consent and certainly hadn't been collecting them before getting the residents to complete the surveys required for the grant. Well that put us - him, really, since it's his study - into some really deep shit! They view it the same as if we were injecting patients with HIV or something without getting their consent. Thankfully, they decided to give us a slap on the wrist and just require us to go to a training about the importance of regulating research on human subjects (really interesting class, actually). But he had a fit and wrote an official letter (which he actually made me type up and deliver) saying it was all my fault that I failed to comply with study requirements. His idea of taking responsibility in the matter was to say that he shouldn't have trusted me to work without closer supervision.
Anyway, sorry for the dissertation. (Brevity has never been my strong suit. :oops: ) Maybe I just needed to get that off my chest. But these are just a few examples of what happens on a regular basis and it's so frustrating. It's like working with a 5-year-old who always points the finger at someone else when he's in trouble, except since he's smarter than a 5-year-old he's able to be more manipulative.
I just don't know what to do about it. I feel like I can't win. The administration knows how he is; everyone has a hard time working with him for many more reasons than just this one. They made him go to personality training for awhile when we started losing medical assistants and faculty started threatening to quit. I'm the third staff person in my position and the previous two didn't last for more than 6 months. But he's a brilliant, internationally renowned physician who does great things for our patients and brings in more clinical revenue than any other faculty member. And he's actually a good guy except for his personality problems. I mean, he's not evil or mean-spirited or anything - just self-serving.
Has anyone else here ever been in a similar situation? How did you deal with it? :?
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For myself , when I've had the opportunity to see my behavior on paper, that went a long way to helping me change that behavior.
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at least that's how it works when i am the boss.
and believe me, i am the boss @ everything, everywhere i am.
scb, you're fired.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pGlv2Rk5RcA
"Hear me, my chiefs!
I am tired; my heart is
sick and sad. From where
the sun stands I will fight
no more forever."
Chief Joseph - Nez Perce
Does step 2 require you putting your pants back on?
my last boss was ADHD or something too, he would tell me, 'Order whatever drugs Dr. X needs, whatever the cost'. Dr. X told me he only wanted one drug to be stocked, so I ordered it, then I get yelled at that it was too expensive and they'd never use it. After Dr. X left the clinic, we used up all of the drug in a few emergency cases, and then my boss told me to keep it in stock.....should have kept a diary of this whole thing to show him how indecisive he was.....:crazy:
- Christopher McCandless
that's silly.
i have extreme attention disorder and i know what i say to people.
i know exactly what i hear and do.
that is screwy.
you people have bosses with more issues than just ADHD.
"Hear me, my chiefs!
I am tired; my heart is
sick and sad. From where
the sun stands I will fight
no more forever."
Chief Joseph - Nez Perce
I have more issues than National Geographic.
I ended up on probation for 2 months because of it. :oops:
The risk I took was calculated, but man, am I bad at math - The Mincing Mockingbird
Shall we call them control issues? Narcissistic Issues? 'Afflicted with Bi-Polar like tendencies'?
- Christopher McCandless
"Hear me, my chiefs!
I am tired; my heart is
sick and sad. From where
the sun stands I will fight
no more forever."
Chief Joseph - Nez Perce
"Hear me, my chiefs!
I am tired; my heart is
sick and sad. From where
the sun stands I will fight
no more forever."
Chief Joseph - Nez Perce
your thread about your boss reminds me of how I dislike people. I've had bosses like him.
regardless of whether he's "brilliant", why is he an administrator? he sounds completely incompetent for the job he has and yet is backed by the administration? i'd say this is unbelievable but this is how businesses and our governments are run now a days
-my dad after hearing Not for You for the first time on SNL .
I try to keep good documentation (which I think offends him). I try to get him to email me about everything, but he likes to call me with his responses, so I have a notebook where I write down what he tells me on the phone and in person.
When I'm talking to him and he's blaming me, though, I don't usually have time to sort through all my documentation to provide the evidence to refute him. If I do, he'll say I'm making a big deal out of nothing. Even if I just mention that I did something because it's what he told me to do, without busting out any documentation, he says I'm being defensive.
But nearly 8 years of being blamed for everything can really add up. And I know it adds up in his mind too. Let's say we have 3 problems with the schedule in a month and he blames me for them each time and each time I point out that they were actually his mistakes. He'll either drop it (without actually taking responsibility) or he'll deny it ("I never would have told you to do that"). If I then show him the email where he did in fact tell me that, he'll say I'm being defensive and then drop it without really taking responsibility. But then at the end of the month when our fellows are exhausted from working the unreasonable schedules he made me give them, he'll tell me I need to do a better job on the schedules from now on.
My job would actually be so perfect, too, if I had a better boss.
ever tell him he's a jerk-off?
"Hear me, my chiefs!
I am tired; my heart is
sick and sad. From where
the sun stands I will fight
no more forever."
Chief Joseph - Nez Perce
I need to be better at this. I'm too nonconfrontational. (No, really, it's true!
he was getting "personality training"?
"Hear me, my chiefs!
I am tired; my heart is
sick and sad. From where
the sun stands I will fight
no more forever."
Chief Joseph - Nez Perce
That last part is certainly true! I threw in the ADHD part because the man can't focus on one way of doing things and follow it through. He actually changes his mind in the middle of his sentence sometimes and I can't figure out what the hell he's talking about. Actually, I'd say most of the time I don't know what the hell he's talking about. I just scowl and nod. Many times when I ask him to clarify what he wants me to do he'll get all impatient & irritated and say, "I don't have time for this!"
It sounds like you can't say anything back to him. I think he'll fire you if you outline everything like you did here.
You've worked for him for 8 years? wow...
maybe he has borderline personality disorder.
8/08 - Ed solo in DC, 6/09 Ed in B'more,
10/10 - Brad in B'more
i hope my ADD/ADHD is not as screwy as what you describe here.
although i am told i cannot tell a story without fucking it all up, im all over the place and have to try very hard to stay on one track rather than several different tracks. it is grueling, believe me.
because of this i fail at life.
your boss sounds like he has multiple problems like 4&20 said
"Hear me, my chiefs!
I am tired; my heart is
sick and sad. From where
the sun stands I will fight
no more forever."
Chief Joseph - Nez Perce
Haha... yeah, unfortunately sometimes (about once every year or two) I get frustrated enough to tell him how I feel about some things. That usually doesn't end particularly well.
I never really thought about it like this. He's the director of our program because 1) he started the program, and 2) he's the one with the medical skills and experience to direct the program. Management skills aren't really a consideration.